Golden thread

I trust that Zerbanoo Gifford will not mind me borrowing the title of one of her books for the title of this post. After all, it is another of her books which appears as an Indian bead on a thread which started on Liberal Democrat Voice.

There was a review by Simon McGrath of Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism by Dinyar Patel. It seems that the Americans have just discovered the first Indian MP. A comment to Simon's post complained of the lack of a British biography. That struck a chord with me, because I distinctly remembered another Liberal pioneer in local government writing a biography of the great man. I checked with the trusty Dictionary of Liberal Biography and sure enough, there it was: Dadabhai Naoroji, Britain's First Asian MP, by Zerbanoo Gifford, published to mark the centenary of Naoroji's first election.

There was also mention of another biography, by a certain R.P. Masani from 1939. (There was a paperback reissue ten years ago.) Minoo (the name by which he seems to have been better-known back home) Masani is an even more forgotten Parsi politician than Naoroji. An early socialist, he was at first taken in, like so many, by the Lenin-Stalin reconstruction of Russia, but eventually came to reject the centralised state to which Pandit Nehru and Congress were leading India. He co-founded the liberal Swatantra party as a counter-balance to Congress. Sadly, it did not catch on (the fact that so many of its supporters were from the moneyed classes must have damaged its image) and it fell to the ultra-nationalist BJP to end Congress's monopoly.